Programs like Word can tell you immediately if you've misspelled a word, but there's no real incentive to fix it if you don't want to. The Spelling Catastrophe Light (more of a display adjustment than a light, but whatever) would gradually turn your monitor display a brighter and brighter shade of red with every misspelled word you typed. If you were really bad, the monitor would eventually become difficult and painful to look at. As you correct misspelled words, the screen gradually returns to normal. This could work in any program (including web browsers) that accept text input.
(inspired by one of waug's postings in "New ideas via concatenation")-- PotatoStew, Jun 05 2001 As-U-Type http://www.asutype.comList: $30.00 US, Fanix Software - PC World gave it 5 stars in Sept. 2001 Issue [thumbwax, Jun 05 2001, last modified Oct 05 2004] What [PeterSealy] said. Just bring your text onto here, and someone'll sort it out for you.-- angel, Jun 05 2001 Actually, I had been thinking of it from the standpoint of having it help people who post here, so our resident pedants don't have to work so hard...-- PotatoStew, Jun 05 2001 <Trans-Atlantic rant> If you go by the spell checker in Word then your screen's going to turn into a radiation hazard by the end of your first paragraph.<end rant>-- DrBob, Jun 05 2001 We hates this one too, my Precious, and we won't let any nasssty computerses correct our ssspellingsss, no, we won't. We hates it forever.-- Dog Ed, Jun 06 2001 How annoying would that be?! Like, if I'm typing a paper about anything with a name in it, for any kind of class, then it's going to be spelled wrong. I had to do a paper on Pride and Prejudice for lit, and MS Word considers 'Bennet' and also 'Austen', not to mention 'Darcy', 'Gardiner', and any other name with that book, WRONG. My screen would have been deadly red and then I couldn't see what I was doing and make even more mistakes. ::OH THE HORROR::-- LaLaLaLola, Aug 31 2001 just dont let mad-man have one-- Fireraven, Aug 31 2001 Dyslexics of the world, untie!-- thumbwax, Aug 31 2001 LaLaLaLola: Double-rightclick the first instance of the name, once it's marked incorrect, and choose 'ignore all'. Or 'add' to add it to the dictionary. One will make it stop bothering you for that session, the other will make it stop bothering you forever...-- StarChaser, Sep 01 2001 .....then there's the dyslexic devil worshipper who sold his soul to Santa...-- keats27, Sep 02 2001 That spell checker that underlines stuff in Word is SERIOUSLY annoying. It makes science reports look like kiddie scribble - recognises about one word in three. It's sad that so many people rely on it rather than just taking the effort to proof their writing. I leave it (and the grammar checker) permanently turned off.-- madradish, Jan 06 2002 I don't. I don't have time to not be lazy.
(I proofread, too, though.)-- Galileo, Jan 30 2002 random, halfbakery